Retable and Frontal of the Life of Christ and the Virgin

This altarpiece is made up of a retable, which was set up behind the altar table in a Catholic church, and a frontal, which decorated the front of the table itself. The work is a testament to the piety of Pedro López de Ayala, who had the altarpiece made for his family’s funerary chapel in their palace in northern Spain. A major figure in the political and cultural life of late-medieval Spain, Ayala was a courtier, diplomat, and soldier in the service of the kings of Castile, eventually serving as chancellor.

The massive altarpiece must have been constructed and painted inside the small chapel. To accomplish this, Ayala called upon local artists, who created a series of scenes that tell the stories of the life of Jesus and his mother, Mary. The composition centers on images of the Crucifixion and of an empty throne that probably once framed a statue of the Virgin and Child. These scenes are not projections of convincing pictorial space. Rather, with their plain backgrounds and framing arcades, they hearken back to earlier architectural decoration and manuscript illumination. The altarpiece was intended to impress through its monumental scale, its narrative clarity, and its costly materials, which include gold and silver leaf and glazes of rare and expensive ultramarine blue.

Ayala expected his altarpiece to be a perpetual plea for his eternal salvation and that of his family, and it remained in the family chapel for more than five centuries. Ayala declared his donation of the altarpiece in honor of Christ and the Virgin Mary through the inscription that runs across the bottom margin; the images of Ayala and his wife, Leonora de Guzman, kneeling in prayer with their son and daughter-in-law at either end of the lower register; and their coats of arms—two wolves and two cauldrons—alternating around the frames.